National Portrait Gallery, London, gift of the National Art Collections Fund in 1917

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This portrait commemorates Constable’s friendship with Ramsay Richard Reinagle when they were students together at the Royal Academy, and Reinagle’s stay with Constable and his family at East Bergholt during the summer of 1799. It shows Constable very much as his first biographer, C.R. Leslie, described him, ‘the tall and well formed handsome miller, with a fresh complexion and fine dark eyes’ (Leslie (1843/45) 1951, p. 4).